Consider adding an RSS feed to your staff’s news site to bring in local, national and world breaking news — you could even add the feed of another school’s site

One service staffs can give to their readers is providing news from other outlets like your local newspaper or a national one. All this takes is finding the site’s RSS feed online and giving it some space on your site.

An RSS feed doesn’t copy and steal the content from someone else’s site, it just pulls the latest news and directly links to it on your site. For example, I added the Feedzy WordPress plugin to the JEADigitalMedia site and added a widget in the right sidebar and called it “In the News”. There I added the New York Times RSS feed. It’s pulling the Times most recent articles and updates it as new news is published.

It’s an easy way to more news to your readers and fairly easy to setup depending on what you use. I had Feedzy setup in less than 5 minutes.

RSS feeds could also be a neat way to share news from other local high school news sites on your site as well. Do you have other high schools in your district or your athletic conference (like your rival school) that students are interested in? Does that journalism program have a website with news? Find their RSS feed and add it to your site — and then reach out to see if they will add yours to their site. Both sites get more traffic, everyone wins.